Re: Feature request: vpn auto-connect

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 00:17 -0400, Golam Mortuza Hossain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> After two weeks of frustrating attempts to run nm, finally I could get
> nm (0.6.2-linux2go) working in my z60t thinkpad (running kubuntu 6.06.1)
> with wpa_supplicant (0.5.5) and latest madwifi-ng.  I am really amazed
> with nm operations! Its really cool!!
> 
> In my institute, I need to connect through VPN.  With nm's vpnc plugin,
> this is also hassle-free.  However, a problem arises when
> wireless connection drops out. Although, nm reconnects to the wireless
> network almost immediately but it doesn't run vpnc. So effectively machine
> remains disconnected. Right now, I have to manually connect to VPN
> every time it happens. So I would like to make a feature request for nm.
> 
> Would it be possible to have an association for a given VPN connection
> with a given SSID? So if defined by user, nm would also auto-connect to
> VPN after connecting to the given SSID.

Good point.  We had considered auto-connecting VPN in the early stages
of NM but that got dropped for various reasons.  It's now time to
revisit that.  Your suggestion sounds spot-on.  But let's generalize
that to associating a VPN connection with an NM Configuration (ie, a
collection of settings describing a specific network connection).  I'd
probably want to use a VPN over Bluetooth to my phone which connects to
Sprint using PPP, if just to access my Red Hat email from the middle of
Wisconsin, for example.

Meanwhile, if we really wanted this soon, we could make NM reconnect the
VPN automatically when the connection drops, but not if you explicitly
disabled it.  Somewhat harder than it looks because connection drops
aren't always distinguishable from other circumstances, but certainly
doable.

Dan

> 
> Thanks!!
> Golam
> _______________________________________________
> NetworkManager-list mailing list
> NetworkManager-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list